Computational immersive displays

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 77-79).Immersion is an oft-quoted but ill-defined term used to describe a viewer or participant's sense of engagement with a visual display system or participatory media. Traditionally, advances in immersive quality came at the high price of ever-escalating hardware requirements and computational budgets. But what if one could increase a participant's sense of immersion, instead, by taking advantage of perceptual cues, neuroprocessing, and emotional engagement while adding only a small, yet distinctly targeted, set of advancements to the display hardware? This thesis describes three systems that introduce small amounts of computation to the visual display of information in order to increase the viewer's sense of immersion and participation. It also describes the types of content used to evaluate the systems, as well as the results and conclusions gained from small user studies. The first system, Infinity-by-Nine, takes advantage of the dropoff in peripheral visual acuity to surround the viewer with an extended lightfield generated in realtime from existing video content. The system analyzes an input video stream and outpaints a low-resolution, pattern-matched lightfield that simulates a fully immersive environment in a computationally efficient way. The second system, the Narratarium, is a context-aware projector that applies pattern recognition and natural language processing to an input such as an audio stream or electronic text to generate images, colors, and textures appropriate to the narrative or emotional content. The system outputs interactive illustrations and audio projected into spaces such as children's rooms, retail settings, or entertainment venues. The final system, the 3D Telepresence Chair, combines a 19th-century stage illusion known as Pepper's Ghost with an array of micro projectors and a holographic diffuser to create an autostereoscopic representation of a remote subject with full horizontal parallax. The 3D Telepresence Chair is a portable, self-contained apparatus meant to enhance the experience of teleconferencing.by Daniel E. Novy.S.M

Content creation for seamless augmented experiences with projection mapping

This dissertation explores systems and methods for creating projection mapping content that seamlessly merges virtual and physical. Most virtual reality and augmented reality technologies rely on screens for display and interaction, where a mobile device or head mounted display mediates the user's experience. In contrast, projection mapping uses off-the-shelf video projectors to augment the appearance of physical objects, and with projection mapping there is no screen to mediate the experience. The physical world simply becomes the display. Projection mapping can provide users with a seamless augmented experience, where virtual and physical become indistinguishable in an apparently unmediated way. Projection mapping is an old concept dating to Disney's 1969 Haunted Mansion. The core technical foundations were laid back in 1999 with UNC's Office of the Future and Shader Lamps projects. Since then, projectors have gotten brighter, higher resolution, and drastically decreased in price. Yet projection mapping has not crossed the chasm into mainstream use. The largest remaining challenge for projection mapping is that content creation is very difficult and time consuming. Content for projection mapping is still created via a tedious manual process by warping a 2D video file onto a 3D physical object using existing tools (e.g. Adobe Photoshop) which are not made for defining animated interactive effects on 3D object surfaces. With existing tools, content must be created for each specific display object, and cannot be re-used across experiences. For each object the artist wants to animate, the artist must manually create a custom texture for that specific object, and warp the texture to the physical object. This limits projection mapped experiences to controlled environments and static scenes. If the artist wants to project onto a different object from the original, they must start from scratch creating custom content for that object. This manual content creation process is time consuming, expensive and doesn't scale. This thesis explores new methods for creating projection mapping content. Our goal is to make projection mapping easier, cheaper and more scalable. We explore methods for adaptive projection mapping, which enables artists to create content once, and that content adapts based on the color and geometry of the display surface. Content can be created once, and re-used on any surface. This thesis is composed of three proof-of-concept prototypes, exploring new methods for content creation for projection mapping. IllumiRoom expands video game content beyond the television screen and into the physical world using a standard video projector to surround a television with projected light. IllumiRoom works in any living room, the projected content dynamically adapts based on the color and geometry of the room. RoomAlive expands on this idea, using multiple projectors to cover an entire living room in input/output pixels and dynamically adapts gaming experiences to fill an entire room. Finally, Projectibles focuses on the physical aspect of projection mapping. Projectibles optimizes the display surface color to increase the contrast and resolution of the overall experience, enabling artists to design the physical object along with the virtual content. The proof-of-concept prototypes presented in this thesis are aimed at the not-to-distant future. The projects in this thesis are not theoretical concepts, but fully working prototype systems that demonstrate the practicality of projection mapping to create immersive experiences. It is the sincere hope of the author that these experiences quickly move of the lab and into the real world